Automotive vehicles are increasingly equipped with on-board restraint devices that deploy in the event that the vehicle rolls over in an attempt to provide added protection to occupants of the vehicle. For example, a pop-up roll bar can be deployed to extend vertically outward to increase the height of support provided by the roll bar upon detecting an anticipated vehicle rollover event. Additionally, many vehicles are typically equipped with multiple air bags, side curtains, and seatbelt pretensioners. These and other restraint devices generally require timely deployment to mitigate adverse effects to occupants in the vehicle. To achieve timely deployment of many restraint devices, the dynamic motion of the vehicle must be monitored and a decision must be made to determine whether a vehicle rollover is anticipated.
Various single sensor and multiple sensor rollover detection modules have been employed in vehicles to sense the static and dynamic conditions of the vehicle and to further predict an anticipated vehicle rollover. Some sophisticated vehicle rollover sensing approaches employ discrimination algorithms implemented in a controller to process sensed vehicle motion and determine an anticipated vehicle overturn condition in the future. This enables the advanced deployment of restraint devices, at least in some situations. In several vehicle driving scenarios, a vehicle rollover becomes a secondary crash, or is a result of severe out-of-control driving. As a consequence, occupants are often moved out of their normally-seated positions prior to the onset of significant vehicle roll. An out of position occupant may experience less favorable mitigation to injuries since most deployable restraint devices are generally designed for use with normally-seated occupants.
It is therefore desirable to anticipate a potential vehicle rollover event sufficiently early to allow remedial action to be taken, such as deploying one or more restraint devices and/or controlling vehicle functions.